Justin Cronin

If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Writing is a job: you must show up.

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.